Characterization of Responder Profiles for Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy through Unsupervised Clustering of Clinical and Strain Data.

Background: The mechanisms of improvement of left ventricular (LV) function with cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) are not yet elucidated. The aim of this study was to characterize CRT responder profiles through clustering analysis, on the basis of clinical and echocardiographic preimplantation data, integrating automatic quantification of longitudinal strain signals.

Methods: This was a multicenter observational study of 250 patients with chronic heart failure evaluated before CRT device implantation and followed up to 4 years.